Hotels to be turned into business centres in Sofia
Some of Sofia’s well-known hotels were to be soon convert into commercial and office buildings, investors told, as quoted by Dnevnik daily on October 29.Grandhotel Bulgaria, in the centre of Sofia, would change its function, announced Emil Vassilev, representative of BT Development Services, one of the companies that succeed former state-owned Balkantourist. Meanwhile, another hotel in downtown Sofia, Serdica, would also be turned into a multi-functional building. Other old-time hotel buildings in the city were to come after the example soon, after failing to withstand the competition from newly built luxury hotels.
The four-star Grandhotel Bulgaria was one of the oldest hotels in the centre of Sofia. In the past few months it had not been operating at full capacity and a part of it was gone through repair. Due to increasing competition from new hotels, the owners had settled to change the building’s purpose, said Dessislava Kinova, marketing manager of BT Development Services, as quoted by Dnevnik.
The investment fund Equest, which owned the Serdica hotel, had a such reason for a rearrangement. After carefully researching the market, Equest decided to close the hotel and turn its construction into a business centre with offices and retail stores.
The reconstruction of Grandhotel Bulgaria was to be completed by 2010. The planned investment was 80 million leva, for which the company was gave a First Class Investment Certificate on October 26, Dnevnik announced. The certificate entitles the project to infrastructure funding from local and state government.
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